Assigned to assist the Salt Lake City police in the investigation of the murder of Afton McWain, a controversial colleague whose body turns up in a gravel quarry, forensic geologist Em Hansen confronts the results of the victim's turbulent personal life.

Geologist Emily Hansen, a lowly mud-loggerin the oilfields, is hired by an oil company in Denver foran office job and gets her first taste of corporate life, which includes two suicides in the space of a few days. That's if they were suicides. Emily decides to find out. By the author of Tensleep.

"After an environmental lawyer, a copper mining executive, and an ethnobotanist are killed, geologist Frankie MacFarlane becomes a suspect. Frankie must decipher interlocking puzzles to clear her name and to find the killer in a mystery that involves the conflict between mining and land values in the Southwest"--Provided by publisher.

Lady geologist Em Hansen is hired by an oil millionaire to find the killer of his wife. The investigation plays out against the background of oil drilling and flying, Em being a pilot.

Sent undercover to a thoroughbred horse track, geologist Raleigh Harmon investigates a string of mysterious horse deaths, but when her own life is threatened, only her connection to the FBI, Jack Stephanson, can help her.

Em Hansen works as a mudlogger among a mostly coarse crew of working men. Though she suffers the ill will of the majority, Em is doggedly attached to her work, which involves recording data about mud samples, even as the arrival of a coolly elegant woman geologist increases the sexism quotient. The first death claims Em's mentor Bill, a careful man whose car skids out of control; next to go is young Willie, apparently crushed to death by wild horses....

"Forensic geologist Emily Hansen uses geological clues to solve crimes. Now, fresh from extricating herself - just barely - from suspicion in the investigation of the murder of a dinosaur paleontologist in Salt Lake City, Em allows a wily FBI agent to talk her into assisting the Bureau on another case." "Em and the agent head into the deserts of Nevada: gambling and gold-mining country, where fortunes - and lives - are won and lost. Their task is...